Creative Process

Choosing the right colors for Frames of Exhaustion was harder than I expected. At first, I thought burnout should just look dark, lots of blacks and grays. But when I started painting, it felt flat. It didn’t capture the chaotic energy of trying to keep up with school while falling apart inside. To get unstuck, I used divergent thinking, a concept we discussed in CPSA250. Instead of looking for the one "right" answer, I forced myself to come up with as many wild, unrelated color ideas as possible without judging them. I stopped trying to make it look "sad" and started playing with clashing tones. I mixed bright, energetic yellows and pinks against heavy, dripping blues and messy black strokes. It felt weird at first, but then it clicked. The bright colors represented the mask students wear, the pressure to look happy and productive while the dark, chaotic layers showed the exhaustion underneath. Runco and Acar (2012) explain that divergent thinking helps break fixed patterns by generating multiple possibilities. For me, this meant letting go of the idea that "burnout = dark." By allowing myself to experiment with contradictory colors, I found a visual language that actually felt true to the interviews I conducted.

This process taught me that my best ideas come when I stop trying to be perfect and start playing. In the future, I want to build more time for this kind of messy experimentation into my schedule, rather than waiting until I’m stuck to try something new.